Revision as of 15:03, 28 February 2014

Explanation

Megan and Cueball create a new pet by putting an EEE PC into a hamster ball, allowing it to roll around.

The Asus Eee PC was one of the first subnotebook computers available on the American market, noted for its small size and coming pre-installed with Linux. With a diagonal size of 11 inches, it would take a big hamster wheel to carry it like this.

Omniwheels are wheels with rollers mounted on the edge to allow the wheel to slide sideways. The wheels in the drawing look more like Mecanum wheels, which have rollers mounted at an angle to the edge. Both Omniwheels and Mecanum wheels are used in omni-directional drive systems, like you would use to drive a hamster ball from the inside.

TCO is total cost of ownership, which is exactly what it sounds like: the purchase price of something, plus all costs of keeping, operating, and/or maintaining that something. It's used in accounting to determine something's true cost-to-value evaluation. In the case of a cat, TCO would primarily consist of food and veterinary care, with possible additions for catsitting services, damage caused by feline misbehavior, etc. For the device in the comic, there would be a small ongoing cost (occasional recharges for the batteries) after the initial investment.

Python is a programming language popular among geeks running Linux. Among other features, it has a large number of easily installed 3rd-party libraries which make it easy to add features to programs. In this case, Cueball is importing the "soul" library to give the new pet a soul – obviously something, that a programming language cannot actually do. This is a reference to 353: Python.

The title text refers to the One Laptop per Child project spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte around 2005, with the goal of building an inexpensive, durable sublaptop that could be distributed to children in developing countries to give them an educational edge.